A Matter of Perspective

 Our nine-year-old granddaughter went on a trip with her family and left in our charge her prized pet, a hamster she has nurtured into a fat little rodent.  She wrote out a long list of instructions of how we are to take care of the hamster.

  The little critter reminds my wife of a rat. She is deathly afraid of rats. So, it has fallen to me to take care of the hamster, lovingly named Aspen.  I studied the instructions, did my best to assemble the cages, including the tubes through which the hamster can crawl to his delight. I turned off the light and went to bed.

 During the night, I dreamed that my assembly of the cages was faulty, that somehow the tubing came apart and the little creature escaped, running on the loose in our house.  Worse still, I dreamed that our dog tracked it down and ate it.  It was a nightmare.  How would I explain this to my granddaughter upon her return?

 Before I climbed out of bed, I had already decided that if what I dreamed actually happened, I would make a dash to the local pet store and buy another hamster to replace Aspen.  I told this to my wife.  She said our granddaughter would notice, since Aspen is fat.

 When I looked in, all was well.  Aspen was quietly sitting in his little burrow staring at me with his beady little eyes.  I fed him and watered him, just the way my granddaughter instructed me to do.  I checked the cage. Everything was secure.  So, I relaxed in my recliner beside the window that looks out on our back deck.  That is when I spied Freddie, another rodent much larger than the little vermin I am guarding for my granddaughter, a local squirrel.

 A few weeks ago my wife bought a bird feeder and hung it from a branch of the aspen in our back yard.  Freddie learned to hang by his hind legs and eat all the bird seed from the feeder, scaring away the birds in the process. 

 In a previous house we had squirrels in the attic.  Someone told me they were afraid of owls, so I bought a Styrofoam owl and placed it in the attic. They ignored the owl.  Maybe they couldn’t see the owl, I thought, so I added lights. They still came.  Someone suggested noise.  I added a boom box.  They invited their friends and had a party.  

 Aspen is a pet. Freddie and his friends are pests. So, what makes the difference?  The difference, I guess, is not in the hamster or the squirrel. The difference is in how we choose to view them.  Maybe the same thing is true about people.  Some we see as “pets.”  We treasure them and want to be around them.  Others we view as “pests.”  We find them a nuisance and try to avoid them. How do I view my neighbors?  Are they “pets” or “pests.” 

 When Jesus was asked to define the term “neighbor” he told the story of the Good Samaritan. When he chose the Samaritan to illustrate the definition of a neighbor, he chose someone the Jews considered a “pest.”  That is how he defined the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”